Sheriff Joe Pelle thinks he's found a partial solution to overcrowding in the Boulder County Jail, but he may need taxpayer support to make it happen.

The project Pelle envisions would take low-risk, employed and easily supervised offenders out of the jail and into a new facility, which could cost somewhere in the range of $8 million to $10 million to build, he says.

To make it happen, officials say a bond issue may face Boulder County voters in the next few years, though nothing has been set.

The point of the project, as Pelle has pitched to the Board of Boulder County Commissioners, would be to free up space for people who need to be in jail, while providing a safer, more nurturing environment for some of the low-level criminals now lumped in with more dangerous offenders.

District Attorney Stan Garnett says he is confident the project is one taxpayers could get behind.

"Financing this expansion will not be hard," he says. "It is a relatively small expense for a construction project and could easily be handled through bonds."

Pelle has secured a grant from the National Institute of Corrections to commission an independent review by an alternative sentencing expert, who'll help determine whether a new facility is, in fact, the best fix for a jail system that's routinely running at capacity and admits to underserving many of its inmates.

He also has tentative support from the commissioners.

"It's definitely a good start," Commissioner Deb Gardner says. "We have a whole continuum of folks that are in the jail who are not necessarily in a facility that best meets their needs. Ideally, what we end up with is the right people, in the right facilities, to get the help they need at the right time."

'New facility needs to be built'

While there is no plan in place yet regarding the location, cost or build date of a potential new facility, there is consensus among local leaders in criminal justice that something needs to be done to lift the stress that overcrowding puts on nearly all of them, in one way or another.

"In my mind, there's absolutely no question. A new facility needs to be built," Garnett says. "It's an issue that's not even subject to a meaningful discussion."

And yet, it's been discussed at length for years, even while overcrowding has been an acknowledged problem for the last decade. Garnett chalks the stall up to a county that favors task forces and dense impact studies over quick, confident decision-making.

"It's not a culture in which people look at a problem and say, 'Let's fix this, and do it now,'" he says. "The issue of jail capacity has been an obvious one here for, I think, 10 years, but the culture in Boulder County is to study things long-term before doing anything."

Meanwhile, on any given day, county work-release programs — which allow inmates the chance to maintain jobs and income while sleeping at the jail — have a roughly two-month queue of people, both in and out of custody, waiting for a slot.

Even for people near the top of the wait list, it can often be two or three weeks before a single spot opens up. That generally leaves more than a dozen people waiting in jail to get into a program designed specifically to keep people out of jail and working.

'I need to start doing things'

Inmate Fernando Olivarez, 22, is one of those casualties. He wants to get into a work-release program, but, like so many others, he'll have to contend with the wait list.

"I can't just be waiting in jail, just because it's crowded in here," he says. "I got a family, man. I've been waiting for two months. I need to start doing things."

Chief Judge Maria Berkenkotter of the 20th Judicial District says the wait list has gotten so bad that, at the time of plea, many defendants now ask for a straight jail sentence instead of waiting for work release.

"That's a pretty significant problem because they may be somebody who's paying child support," she says. "They may have a home, a family. Keeping the job is something the defendant wants and, quite frankly, all the different pieces of the criminal justice system also want."

If Pelle has his way, he'll secure funding for an alternative sentencing facility similar to the one in Larimer County. That project, built in 2012, cost $10.6 million, and it costs another $4 million a year to keep running. The Larimer facility was paid for by a bond issue.

Pelle says the price tag for a Boulder County facility would be more than justifiable.

"I think we're going to need a 200- or 300-bed facility to build something that lets us expand into the future," he says. "We have an immediate need today for 125, 130 beds, and that doesn't include a more expansive use of the program."

Adds Garnett: "This is an area where we need to move quickly. My personal view is that every day that goes by is a day that we should've been moving forward."

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